Evacuation plans require realism

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission apparently has no understanding of human behavior, especially in and around nuclear power plants should there be a catastrophic event.

Its dismissal of a newly released Government Accountability Office report is disturbing. That report concluded people living beyond the official 10-mile evacuation zone might be so frightened by the prospect of spreading radiation that they would flee of their own accord, clogging roads and turning evacuation routes into parking lots.

The GAO report, requested by four U.S. senators including Barbara Boxer of California and Robert P. Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania, recommended a federal study of how people outside the 10-mile zone would respond to a nuclear emergency and incorporating that new perspective into evacuation standards. Casey suggested that legislation might be needed, but did not elaborate.

The NRC maintains that evacuation planning is not needed beyond 10 miles from nuclear sites. If Oyster Creek, in Lacey in Ocean County, should have a meltdown on a summer Saturday, does the commission truly believe that people 11 miles away, or 15 or 20 miles away, will blithely go on frolicking at the beach? Yet the NRC clings to that fantasy.

People would head for the hills. And no one needs a report to tell them that. Look at what happened two years ago at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan. When a tsunami cut off power and nuclear fuel melted, more than 150,000 people fled the Fukushima area, many from well beyond 12 miles.

The NRC is stuck in the past, hanging on to the fact that when sites for nuclear plants were chosen decades ago, those areas were rural. But as the Associated Press noted in a series of stories in 2011, the population growth has shot up 350 percent within 10 miles of nuclear sites between 1980 and 2010. This means that about 120 million Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, according to the AP's analysis of census data.

Ocean County's population has more than tripled since construction began on Oyster Creek in 1965, yet the carrying capacity of the roads in the region has remained essentially unchanged. We have been arguing for a sane evacuation plan from Oyster Creek for a decade. Environmentalists have long pressed for a 20-mile evacuation zone. Given the NRC's intransigence on the scope of the evacuation, that hasn't happened.

The study requested by the GAO seems like one designed to confirm the obvious. But it could be what is needed to move Congress to pass legislation requiring more realistic evacuation standards. The NRC's policy when it comes to a worst-case scenario at Oyster Creek and other plants seems to be to cross its fingers and hope for the best. Given the millions of people living in the shadow of these plants, that's unacceptable.

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Evacuation plans require realism

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission apparently has no understanding of human behavior, especially in and around nuclear power plants should there be a catastrophic event.

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